Lapham-Hickey Steel owns and operates seven different locations around the United States. The branch I am currently interning at is located in Oshkosh. Our headquarters is located in the Chicago, IL. Lapham-Hickey Steel offers raw materials and/or value added services to the steel industry. Lapham-Hickey Steel has been family owned and operated for 85 years, and is ranked in the top 50 service centers in the United States.

My Role / Obtaining My Internship

I started my role as a Marketing and Inside Sales Intern at Lapham-Hickey Steel in May of 2012. I found out about this internship through the school’s website using TitanJobs. To be honest, I had never heard of the company before, but the description of the internship seemed to be just what I was looking for. So far I have done just about a little bit of everything. This includes B2B calling, creating flyers and ads, integrating the iPad into the office, organizing customer events, planning trade shows for our sales team, and giving a presentation at a managers meeting . Personally, I believe this is the best internship I could have hoped for because I now know what field of marketing I want to go into.

Going Into the Internship

Going into my internship I was a little bit nervous because this was the first time I had a job in an office. After a few days in the office my nerves were settled, and I was able to use my marketing knowledge when completing my work. The classes that seem to be the most beneficial to me this far would have to be my marketing classes and QBA. I never thought I would be using the majority of my classes, which was a big eye opener. I find myself using bits and pieces of each class every day.

Internship Walk Through

I have found my internship to be more beneficial than any other part of the College of Business. I have connected with many people in the office, and already have a great relationship with them. There is only one other intern at Lapham-Hickey Steel, and I was actually friends with her before we started interning, which was a great bonus of the job. It is hard for me to describe a typical day on the job because there really isn’t one. Just about every day there are new tasks that are given to me. I love this because it keeps me thinking. It is not the same thing every day which to me would get boring really quickly. To me the most important thing I learned at my internship is that being able to work together in many cases is a great way to get things done. I cannot even count how many times working on projects as a team helped us get the work assigned to us done not only faster, but more efficiently and with a better turn out.